Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of tracking, collecting, and analyzing user data for gyms.
Description of the Related Art
There are tens of millions of paid members today who exercise regularly in gyms, including fitness centers, health clubs, and recreational centers. Many of them follow an exercise routine, either set by themselves or by their trainers, to achieve certain results in personal fitness and health. Therefore, it is important and valuable to track gym members' activities, which can then be used to compare against the pre-set routines and to help adjust or set new goals.
However, in most gyms, once a member checks into the gym, the member (and the member's trainer, if any) loses track of the exercise activities, unless the member or the member's trainer pulls out a pen and paper to manually write down the activities. The “pen and paper” approach is used by some people, but often works poorly because of its inconvenience. In recent years, a number of mobile applications (apps) have emerged to help members log exercise activities electronically, but these apps still require manual inputs and hence are not easy to be used by most members.
There are also solutions that combine wearable devices and mobile apps to record exercise activities, such as counting the number of steps that a user has walked. The types of activities which can be recognized, as well as the recognition accuracy, are limited, thus preventing wearable devices from serving as general exercise tracking systems in gyms where many different types of activities can be conducted.
Other existing solutions extend certain fitness equipment with electronic devices for a trainer to manually set a personalized exercise routine on each of the exercise devices, and for each member who is willing to use this service. But this type of solution is known to be inconvenient—the routine setting is manual and time consuming, and every time a member needs to change a routine on any equipment, a trainer or other person must be present to help. In addition, this approach can be costly because the installation procedure for each individual exercise device is complicated, requiring drilling holes on the equipment stands for power-line wiring, communication cable wiring, and/or electronic display mounting. The inconvenience and high cost of this type of solution prohibit it from massive adoption in gyms, and are therefore not available for most gym members.
There are also existing solutions that focus on monitoring the usage of exercise devices or equipment, and reporting how much time the equipment is occupied and/or operated by users. A gym can use this information to decide whether to add or reduce the number of a specific type of equipment. One of the missing elements in this type of solution is associating the usage time of equipment to the user who uses that equipment. Therefore, it does not solve the fundamental problem of tracking each user's activities in the gym.
There are many reasons for the lack of a powerful, convenient, low-cost, and universal gym user data collection system. First, there are millions of expensive exercise equipment that have already been deployed in gyms. Replacement of the existing equipment with intelligent ones is costly and slow. Second, there are many equipment manufacturers and vendors, but there is no widely accepted standard to unify the communications protocols. Third, although there are various mobile apps to help members log exercise activities electronically, these apps, as mentioned above, still require manual inputs, and therefore, create another level of inconvenience for the users.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide methods and systems that overcome these and other deficiencies of the related art.